Whether you like it or not, or whether you are AWARE of it or not, your employees, suppliers and partners are using social media in some form or another.

A recent Forrester Report indicated that 75% of Australian adult internet users are engaged with some form of social media – which leaves only a quarter of the online population disengaged. This is bound to change over time as celebrities, brands and corporations begin to actively participate in online conversation.

So what are you to do?

Here are some guidelines for creating social media guidelines that will be EFFECTIVE and be easily adopted by your employees. It follows the W-R-I-T-E approach:

• Write your guidelines in CONVERSATIONAL language. Sure get your legal, corporate affairs and HR teams involved, but then hand the crafting of the guidelines over to someone who can write with your personal audience in mind.
• Remind people that social media is hard work - that it takes commitment to be engage an audience. But also provide assistance and resources. Is there a real-time instant messenger contact that can provide advice to your teams? Include their details.
• Interact - suggest where employees can and maybe even should engage with social media ("write what you know about" - social media is about niche content, connecting with an audience around your passionate interest. Find your work passion and write about it)
• Trust and encourage your employees to use personal judgement - we are all grown ups but sometimes things get heated. In simple terms - don’t write something that you wouldn’t want your kids or parents to find - because Google can see it all.
• Educate your employees so that they understand that a comment about your company in a private capacity can be misconstrued by readers and can be taken as an official endorsement/recommendation

And even though this should be a standard approach to any business communication – use a spell checker. In a world created by text communications, typos and bad spelling simply indicate sloppy work.

The following examples of corporate social media policies can help you get started with your own. Many are released via a creative commons license, which means that you are free to use them as source material as long as you acknowledge the source:

• Sun’s Guidelines on Public Discourse
• Blog Council (US) Disclosure Policy
• IBM Social Computing Guidelines
• Intel Social Media Guidelines
• BBC Personal Use of Social Media
• Telstra’s Social Media Engagement Policy

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